Friday, April 04, 2008

Hard Times

These last couple of months, things have been pretty sucky money-wise. I wait for pay-day the way I used to wait for pocket money. It seems like it’s that way for everyone and shoddier for a lot more.

One of my dear friends showed up a few weeks ago to say hello to the baby with his grandson and a small gift. Both his grown daughter and son live with him, so I wound up asking about everyone under his roof--plus a couple of foster kids. Remember I said both his grown children live with him? It’s so that they can make the payments on the house. This wave of foreclosures you’ve been hearing about in the news? Happening to them.

When foreclosure looms (if ever there was a threat that deserves the use of looms, it is this), over someone you know, you can’t easily console them. Not with platitudes, not with small loan offers, not with brainstormed ideas. It still looms. I could tell that both of us wished that the topic hadn’t come up, because we were tip-toeing around that elephant for the rest of the visit.

And then another moment of love happened. He works a 9-5 blue-collar job, but he’s also a lay preacher and had been urging me to christen Baby A “properly in a church.” Now I don’t know what Baby A is--perhaps Unitarian Universalist (which is evidently another way of saying I don’t know what we are)—but not “properly" anything at all. Since it’s important mostly to him, I say we’ll do it at his store-front church and we spend the next half-hour comfortably talking about dates, who to invite etc. And I think we’re past it and to indulge him further, I propose that he be the baby’s godparent, as well and he accepts delightedly.

But a few minutes later, he returns to that moment. I think you should choose someone else, he says. I’m surprised. Why? I keep asking him, Why?

I’m stupid, that’s why. Choose someone with money, he says. In case something happens to you, I can look after the baby, but someone with money can send her to college too.